


the fantastic, intensely american adventure of two competitive english teachers

by LydiaOfNarnia



Series: just learn me right [2]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Teachers, M/M, webster is british (kinda)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 20:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11676624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LydiaOfNarnia/pseuds/LydiaOfNarnia
Summary: "I have this prompt idea for Webgott: Web and Lieb work in same highschool. They are both English teachers. The only difference is that Web is British, Joe is American. They fight over everything: from literature, to teaching techniques, to history, and it always ends with mocking the other's accent and almost shouting. They fight which football is real football. They fight which dinner served in cafeteria is the best. It even comes down to leaving passive-aggressive or outright rude messages on boards in their classrooms. Students are all making bets when they will fight with fists. Bonus: their classrooms are facing. They put a show by holding eye contact and slamming doors every morning."





	the fantastic, intensely american adventure of two competitive english teachers

**Author's Note:**

> Based off [a set of headcanons i posted on my Tumblr!](https://renelemaires.tumblr.com/post/163502137854/i-loved-your-teacherau-pretty-please-maybe)
> 
> Of course, the characters in this fic are based off of their fictional portrayals from the miniseries Band of Brothers, and I mean no disrespect to the real-life veterans!
> 
> Find me on tumblr at [renelemaires](http://renelemaires.tumblr.com/)!

Joe knows he’s going to hate the new teacher the second he opens his mouth, and not just because of the ridiculously posh accent that pours out. Everything about the man grinds on his nerves, from the dark-rimmed professor glasses perched in his nose to the way he wears sweater vests yet rolls up the sleeves of the white shirt underneath (to reveal muscular, surprisingly hairy arms). The fact that he just came here from freaking England is just the icing on Joe’s hate-cake, and his dumb accent does nothing to help.  


Joe walks away from his first meeting feeling exhausted, disgusted, and more than a little pissed off. What the hell is _British-American_ anyway? Who _says_ that? And who claims that students can take more from books written by guys who’ve been dead for a hundred years than any contemporary literature?

He makes his decision then and there: he hates David Kenyon Webster.

(He has three names too. How pretentious do you have to be to have three damn names?)

If he thought the first day was bad, he was not prepared for an entire year of dealing with Webster. It doesn’t help that their classes are positioned directly across from each other. Webster likes to keep an “open door” policy, during class and after hours. This gives Joe a front-row seat to everything Webster does, whether he likes it or not. Everything that he sees only grinds on hsi nerves more.

Webster brews his own tea in the classroom. He has a tea maker, like a goddamn coffee maker but for _tea_ , and he won’t let anyone else use it. He has a bookshelf full of classical literature and poetry, and he spends his time in between periods reading. On hot days he’ll sometimes take his vest off, just to teach in shirtsleeves (with his _stupid arms_ that Joe _can’t stand)._ Webster’s enthusiasm for his subject is so infectious that even his students can’t help getting excited.

Joe isn’t allowed to come to school in his comic book t-shirts, because apparently starting a Marvel vs. DC war amongst the entire tenth grade “isn’t allowed in a positive school environment”. He has to wait in the English lounge for gritty coffee just like the rest of the department. He has to figure out ways to make his curriculum adaptable to students who couldn’t give half a shit about _The Call of the Wild_ or _The Great Gatsby._

Somehow, Webster comes up ahead of him at every turn, and Joe is sick of it.

He’s never sure who starts most of their arguments, but there’s a new one every day. They range from things like “shut your door when you’re teaching, I don’t want to hear your opinion on Dickens’s personal life” to “just because you kick the ball doesn’t make it football, I dare you to say that to the entire football team”. Mostly it’s just venomous words and insults. They’ve only come close to getting physical once, and that was because Joe made the mistake of mimicking Webster’s accent in the prissiest voice possible. It got a great laugh from his students, but then Webster stormed into his classroom like a man on fire and they almost threw down in front of twenty freshmen.

(Someone filmed it. They put it on Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. For the rest of that week, kids kept stopping Joe in the hallways asking him when he was going to actually fight Webster, and he’s pretty sure students are still placing bets on who would win.

Hell, he thinks teachers are placing bets too.)

“Have you considered,” Chuck Grant, who teaches Modern World History, says one day, “that you might be a little bit obsessed?”  


“You try working across the hall from him, see how obsessed you are,” Joe shoots back. He’s glaring into his coffee, and can clearly make out the lumps at the bottom. It makes him feel a little nauseous. Would Webster actually hit him if he tried using his tea maker?  


“Seems like you’ve got a problem,” Randleman, the gym teacher who’s so big that the entire student and faculty body just call him Bull, remarks. Joe rolls his eyes, nodding to the ‘NO SMOKING’ sign clearly displayed on the door of the teacher’s lounge. Randleman just takes another puff of his cigar.  


Of course, just like freaking Beetlejuice, Webster walks in the second they say his name. He blinks at the other teachers, clearly surprised by the way his entrance has killed all conversation in the room. After a minute he walks to the back of the room, picks up a plain bagel, and leaves without a word.

“He eats bagels plain,” Joe observes, and grits his teeth. “I hate him.”  


* * *

Things escalate. Joe walks into his classroom one morning to find unfamiliar script decorating his whiteboard. _“I misjudged you,”_ the familiar quote reads. _“You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”_

Joe is just as quick to fire back. After his lunch break, Webster returns to find a stick figure caricature of himself wearing oversized pants and waving a British flag. The caption next to it reads:    _“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”_ Beneath it, in less neatly scrawled handwriting, Joe says, _Hemingway? Really?_

The next day, Webster shows exactly how pissed off he is:  _“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.”_

Joe’s just impressed he managed to fit all of that on the whiteboard.

His response that afternoon is simple: _“My dear, I don’t give a damn.”_

* * *

Joe is halfway through grading his freshman class’ book reports on Fahrenheit 451 when he looks across the hall. He doesn’t mean to; he’s just in the middle of a particularly dull thesis, he’s bored, and when he needs a distraction his eyes find Webster without even intending to. What he sees causes the paper to flutter out of his hand. He springs from his seat like he’s just been shot, and storms across the hallway.

“Oh my god,” he says, marching into the classroom like it’s his own. “You don’t need the glasses.”  


Webster’s eyes are wide as soccer balls, blinking at him in owlish surprise. The glasses – the stupid, pretentious, lame-as-a-one-legged-horse glasses he constantly wears are sitting untouched on the desk. Webster has his face buried in a book, his glasses going totally ignored.

“I –” he says; then stops, reconsiders, and swallows hard. “I just,” he tries again, then closes his mouth and gives up altogether. The grin spreading it’s way across Joe’s face is slow and lethal.

“You don’t need the glasses,” he says again. “They’re fucking _hipster glasses.”_

Webster is the type of guy to wear glasses just to look smart. This is all the blackmail Joe could ever want on him. This is _perfect._

“Joe, it’s not what you think –”  


“You’re a fake.” Joe laughs out the words, delighted beyond belief. “A fraud.”  


“I’m definitely not that –”  


“What’s next? Do you actually not like tea? Have you never eaten biscuits? Ooh, have you been pretending to have an accent this entire time?”  


Webster is silent for too long.

“Oh my god,” says Joe. “Your accent.”  


“I’m _British-American,_ I told you,” Webster spits back, in a perfectly clear American accent. Joe’s heart is doing cartwheels in his chest. This is the best day of his life. “I was raised in New York until I was twelve, I can do both accents just fine, it isn’t _fake_ –”

He’s cut off by Joe’s horselike guffaws breaking a new sound barrier. Webster slumps back in his seat, disgruntled, while Joe clutches his stomach and tries to remember how to breathe. He isn’t sure just what sort of dirt he’d hoped and prayed he would find on Webster, but this… this is better than anything he could have dreamed of.

“Web, jesus, I could –” he gasps when he’s finally managed to catch his breath. Webster, tired of sulking, is on his feet now, glowering at Joe with arms crossed.  


“You could what?”  


“Hell – I could –” Joe can’t stand it. He breaks into another fit of laughter.  


He’s aware of Webster’s blazing glare on him as the other teacher stalks up to where he’s standing. Even his angry walk looks prissy in those slacks that hug his legs so tightly, with those muscular arms crossed like the professor he is… he looks ridiculous. He is a ridiculous person. Joe knew it all along, only now he has proof.

“Do what?” demands Webster, well and truly in Joe’s face. “You’re gonna tell everyone? Get me laughed out of the school? That’s what you want, isn’t it Joe, so just say it –”  


“Oh my god, Web, shut up,” Joe hisses, and then kisses him.  


It wasn’t like he planned it. Whenever he read about spur-of-the-moment kisses, he always wrote them off as some author’s invention of what the perfect kiss should look like. They weren’t things that actually happened; fantasies, nothing more than that. Before this moment Joe would have sworn up and down that something that romantic and spontaneous could not exist.

He was wrong.

He tells himself he’s kissing Webster just to shut him up, but it’s much more than that. It is the feeling of those strong, plump lips moving against his own, angry and passionate. It is the hands that move to grip his arms, as if holding them both steady. It is the beat of Webster’s heart against his chest, the warm brush of his breath against his jaw when they slowly part.

Joe feels a release of tension he hadn’t even known he’d been harboring. All at once, every little resentment he built up about the teacher across from him has melted away. It has turned into something corporeal, solid, and real. Joe’s resentment is standing just centimeters away from him, staring up at him with wide blue eyes, and that’s the moment it hits Joe that it was never resentment at all.

“Your secret’s safe with me, Web,” he mutters against Webster’s lips. “Colleague confidentiality.”  


That’s a thing, right? Joe doesn’t know. The only thing he’s sure of is that he wants to kiss Webster again, so he does; and when he realizes he wants to hold him close and not let go, he does that too.

* * *

It was a little (okay, a lot) annoying to find out that their colleagues had made bets on when they would get together. Hell, even Principal Winters was in on it, and that’s a betrayal Joe never saw coming. He’s less surprised to see money exchanging students’ hands when they catch sight of the messages scribbled on each teachers’ board every day – now more romantic than antagonistic.

Joe doesn’t know what he expected. Then again, Webster has a way of taking him by surprise. His quirks are a lot easier to put up with when Joe’s no longer seeing them through a haze of blind resentment, and he’s a lot less pretentious than he lets on.

Webster, as it turns out, is a total nerd. Joe isn’t sure why he’s surprised. He wears sweater vests, for god’s sake.

He hums a tuneless melody to himself as he packs up the last of his books for the afternoon. Tonight will be busy – he’s got three classes worth of tests to grade, then a date with Webster at six. They’re going to a burger and fry joint – painfully American, and just what Joe insists Webster needs to “shake that Britishness out of you”. Webster is quietly disgusted by the food, but endures it for Joe’s sake.

Joe casts one last look up at his whiteboard, and huffs a dry laugh when he reads the message there. He doesn’t know when Webster found the time to do it, but he’s sure happy none of their student caught sight of it. (That would put them on social media for an entirely different reason.)

_“You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.“_

Joe smiles, and locks his classroom door behind him.


End file.
